Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education Requirements through 2018

Carnevale, Anthony P.; Smith, Nicole; Strohl, Jeff

Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce

The recession that began in December of 2007 is already 30 months old, but the U.S. economy will not recover its pre-recession employment levels for at least another two years. From there, it will take an additional three years to make up for lost growth and create a job market strong enough to employ both the casualties of the recession and the millions of new workers who will stream into the workforce from schools across the country. In this report, the authors look at the current state of the economy, assess the prospects for job creation through 2018, and detail what employers will be looking for once hiring resumes. Among other things, they find that: (1) There is a growing mismatch between the jobs that will be created over the next decade and the education and training of our adult workers. More than 60 million of our prime-age workforce who are 25-54 years old are still working in jobs that require high school or less; (2) The postsecondary education and training system will fall short by 3 million or more postsecondary degrees. Economic demand will not be met, denying numerous Americans access to middle-class career pathways; (3) Hundreds of thousands of Manufacturing and Natural Resources jobs in farming, fishing, and forestry have been destroyed in the recession and will not be coming back; (4) The U.S. economy will create 46.8 million job openings by 2018, including 13.8 newly created jobs and 33 million "replacement" positions produced when workers retire; (5) Employers filling these jobs, overwhelmingly, will require college degrees or other postsecondary preparation of 63 percent of their new hires; (6) Postsecondary education and training is quickly becoming the only viable path to the American middle class; and (7) Education and training connects directly to occupations and less directly to industries, which can complicate economic development efforts. (Contains 18 tables, 63 figures and 29 footnotes.) [For "Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education Requirements through 2018. Executive Summary," see ED524311.]